Invocations for Creative Writing

Monthly Archives: April 2015

My mood is in synch with the ocean today. Overhead the sky is thick with storm clouds. Rain threatens to come ashore, moving up from the south. I sit on a point extending a quarter mile out into the water, surrounded on three sides by the sea. The water itself is calm. The surface is as flat as I’ve seen it in days. The color of the water mimics the sky, though darker, heavier. The sky is textured, brushed with cloud and a hint of light. The water is solid, motionless, pensive. The sky is dependent on the water which seems to hold it up, appears to keep it from sinking below the surface. In my mind I am the sky, in my heart I am the sea.

For all writers there is a turbulence below the surface that demands attention. Everything is story. We tell ourselves these stories and they define our lives. True or false we live by the mythology we create. What we believe is what we are, and story is the way we try to understand our lives in relation to many things. Primarily we strive to understand our relation to ourselves, our relation to others, and our relation to our environment. The tool we use for communicating these ideas is words. Spoken, written, painted, sung, posted, played, and shouted. Words to define, symbols to express, and for the writer every day is a psychosexual urge to say the things inside our hearts and minds.

On days like today the creative erotic is high. Dark skies and deep water move me to contemplation, and stories and characters well up from my mind in medias res, coming onto the internal screen mid-conversation, with all of their hope and angst and words . . . yes, words fully formed. These words carry emotion and all of the energy that bears a life. They are the ocean holding the weight of the sky. Our words are the measure of a current, sharp and electric, painful sometimes, powerful when we apply them and don’t scornfully cast them out of our mouths as though they can be wasted. For the writer especially, there must be accountability and intent. I have been guilty of slinging words carelessly myself, but that is a sin. A writer must own all of the words he uses, as many before us have learned, because they will remain after we are gone and, fairly or unfairly, we will be judged by them.

What are words for? They are for living and for love. They are for motivating the human race to temperance. They are to communicate new ideas, which are the essence of our development as a species. There is a responsibility that comes with words, but we shall not shy away from using words. The writer is the cultural steward of words and is accountable for assuring that words live on, that they are used accordingly and not cast off as less than urgent.

On a day like today the ocean holds the sky. The words used to convey that fact bind the ocean and sky so that they do not evaporate too quickly. Without words the bond may well go unnoticed, the sanctity of the moment lost, the love affairs – with our lives and with each other – becoming shallow or perhaps altogether non-existent.